[vox-tech] ZIP drive woes

[nbs]

I found some old ZIP disks I had backed up some of my websites on,
and thought I'd poke around and see what I had.

Unfortunately, when I went to use my drive (an older, PPA-style 100MB drive),
I was faced with the following:

  # insmod ppa
  Using /lib/modules/2.2.18pre21/scsi/ppa.o
  ppa: Version 2.05 (for Linux 2.2.x)
  ppa: Found device at ID 6, Attempting to use EPP 32 bit
  ppa: Found device at ID 6, Attempting to use SPP
  ppa: Communication established with ID 6 using SPP
  scsi2 : Iomega VPI0 (ppa) interface
  scsi : 2 hosts.
    Vendor: IOMEGA    Model: ZIP 100           Rev: J.03
    Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
  Detected scsi removable disk sda at scsi2, channel 0, id 6, lun 0
  sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
  sda : status = 0, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
  sda : extended sense code = 6
  sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
  sda: test WP failed, assume Write Protected
   unable to read partition table


The ppa module remains loaded, but whenever I try to mount a disk,
it fails too:

  $ mount /mnt/zip              [ in fstab, it's /dev/sda1 as ext2 fs ]
  sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
  sda : status = 0, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
  sda : extended sense code = 6
  sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
  sda: test WP failed, assume Write Protected
   unable to read partition table
  mount: block device /dev/sda1 is write-protected, mounting read-only
  sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
  sda : status = 0, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
  sda : extended sense code = 6
  sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
  sda: test WP failed, assume Write Protected
   unable to read partition table
  mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device


I tried mounting them as DOS disks, too (/dev/sda4 as vfat fs),
and I was sure that the "lp" kernel module was disabled before
I tried doing the "insmod ppa".


Could it be that my dusty old Iomega drive has finally kicked the
bit bucket?

Or perhaps all four of the disks I'm trying to read are dead!?
(I know one of them worked fairly recently... I believe it was the
disk I tested the Zip drive on when I put this P133 system back together)

FYI I'm running Debian 2.2 and kernel 2.2.18pre21, which came with it.
I didn't build the kernel on this box.  Looking at the kern. config
file "/boot/config-2.2.18pre21", I'm not sure there's any point in
doing so:

  ...
  CONFIG_SCSI=y
  CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD=y
  ...
  CONFIG_SCSI_PPA=m
  ...
  CONFIG_PRINTER=m
  ...

Any ideas?  Or should I go hunt down a new drive?


-bill!